You've actually hit the real crux. Beyond the functional, beyond the Lisp, what is special and unique to Clojure is its style of data modeling. Using plain immutable data-structures creates a very unique style, and I think there isn't enough conversation about that. So it lacks best practices, and possibly support around it as well, in tooling and in style.

It's hard to discuss your particular case, but what I wonder is if there wasn't a different way to model things that would fit in the Clojure data-droven model. And if not, would there be new patterns or even some extension constructs to it that could allow it to fit?